Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Seabane Isn't Real

Po looked puzzled. “What’s seabane?”“I don’t know if you have another name for it in Lienid. It’s a small purple flower. A woman who eats its leaves will not
bear a child.”

And here's a line from Bitterblue:

Bitterblue examined the item in her hand. It was a medicinal envelope with a label written clear across the front: “Seabane, for the prevention of pregnancy.”

Seabane is a fictional herb. I made it up, not unlike the way fantasy writer Tamora Pierce made up a pregnancy charm for Alanna and her other fictional women.

Way back when I was an unpublished writer writing Graceling, choosing the name of this magical contraceptive herb was fun. I knew I wanted a plant name that, to the best of my ability to ensure such a thing, was not a known plant name in the real world in any language, because I didn't want to confuse my fantasy world with the real world and I didn't want to muddle readers ("What? Oregano doesn't prevent pregnancy!"). This left me with the task of making a word up, throwing different syllables together and deciding which ones sounded right.

Turns out that a lot of times, when you try to make a word up, you come up with a word that exists! (It's amazing how many things exist.) So I had to do a lot of checking on my "made-up" words. How? Well, I'm not a botanist, but I did the best I could. I looked my words up in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and of course, I ran them through Google searches.

Gradually, I settled on the word "seabane." It had the right feel, it was serviceable and vague-sounding in meaning… and at the time, when I checked in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and online, nothing came up – in particular, nothing plant-related. Significantly, the word didn't appear at all in the extended Oxford English Dictionary. So I decided it was a safe word to use, and began using it. Then I forgot about it.

A few days ago, my lovely Norwegian translator, Carina Westberg, contacted me with a question about the word "seabane." Where had I gotten it? Had I made it up? Did it have any significance she should know about before she tried to translate it into Norwegian? She told me that she'd done a Google search and all she'd found is that it's toxic to birds.

Toxic to birds?? That was surprising and interesting. So I did a Google search myself. And, forget about the birds. What concerned me much more is that amidst a lot of other things (including many legitimate conversations about my books), I found a very few tiny online conversations to the effect of one person asking, "What is seabane?" and another person answering as if it's an actual contraceptive.

Oh, dear readers. If you are in need of a contraceptive, please talk to a medical professional rather than consulting a fantasy novel OR a conversation forum on the internet. Many of the random forums on the internet are about as reliable as a fantasy novel! If the Internet is your only safe option, try organizations with reliable information, like Planned Parenthood or even the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

Of course, one nice thing is that we can use the Internet to fight the Internet. Please, readers: Feel free to click on the link to this "Seabane Isn't Real" blog post repeatedly, and send it to your friends for them to click on, too, so that if ever someone does a Google search wondering if seabane is real, this blog post explicitly stating that it's not will get bumped up to the top of their results!

(I won't get into how sad it makes me that some of our young people are so under-informed and misguided about safe contraceptive means that they do look to fantasy novels and unreliable parts of the Internet for answers.)

There's also a lesson here for the writers out there (um, aside from how scarily powerful our written words can be). Because actually, it turns out that something called "purple seabane" may in fact exist (though I have to say that after a great deal of research, I'm doubtful). Remember those birds? My Norwegian translator Carina found and shared a couple of websites where "purple seabane" is listed among plants and trees that are toxic to parrots, cockatiels, and other birds (like this list here at cockatielcottage.net). Huh! Back when I was writing Graceling, my Google searches did not bring up these lists. And the weird thing is that I can't find any mention of "purple seabane" anywhere else online, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and toxic plant databases. It only exists on these duplicated bird toxicity lists. So a few days ago, I returned again to the extended OED. Still nothing there. In the volume that would contain "seabane," it goes straight from "sea-apple" to "sea-bank." In the volume that would contain "purple seabane," it goes straight from "purple-red" to "purplewort." (Many thanks to the helpful reference librarians at the Cambridge Public Library who looked those up for me!) I'm now wondering if there might be a typo in these bird lists; if once again, shockingly, someone is wrong on the Internet. Or maybe there is such a thing as purple seabane? Further googling tells me that something called "purple seasbane" (note the extra "s") is toxic to dogs, but I can find no mention of that mysterious plant anywhere else online, either. Hm. I'm not sure. And ultimately, both whether it exists and possibly even my ability to know whether it exists are, like so many things, out of my control.

So, what's the lesson? Remember when I said above that I knew I wanted a name for my fictional plant that, to the best of my ability to ensure such a thing, was not a known plant name in the real world? I now realize that the key part of that sentence is "to the best of my ability to ensure such a thing." Writers: do you absolute best, and remember that this will involve getting things wrong. We will never have perfect knowledge or perfect control.

Popular posts from this blog

"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

-Toni Morrison

Jane, Unlimited is my fourth release, a kaleidoscopic novel about grief, adventure, storytelling, and finding yourself in a world of seemingly infinite choices. It's also about umbrellas and umbrella-making :o). It comes out on September 19, 2017. I hope to have more stuff up about it soon, including reviews and foreign release info! For now --
Jane has lived an ordinary life, raised by her aunt Magnolia—an adjunct professor and deep sea photographer. Jane counted on Magnolia to make the world feel expansive and to turn life into an adventure. But Aunt Magnolia was lost a few months ago in Antarctica on one of her expeditions. Now, with no direction, a year out of high school, and obsessed with making umbrellas that look like her own dreams (but mostly just mourning her aunt), she is easily swept away by Kiran Thrash—a glamorous, capricious acquaintan…

So, I went to a lovely performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by the Russian National Ballet Theatre this weekend. (In case you don't know the story: the Evil Dude Rotbart has turned a bunch of Lovely Girls into swans. One night Prince Siegfried goes hunting with his buddies, sees the swans, falls for the Most Beautiful Swan, and professes his undying love. His promise of eternal love breaks Evil Dude Rotbart's spell and the Most Beautiful Swan and her friends are free to be girls again. But shortly thereafter in a moment of male forgetfulness Prince Siegfried swears his love to Random Girl [who, in his defense, does look an awful lot like the Most Beautiful Swan]. M.B. Swan's heart is broken and Evil Dude Rotbart's spell descends back upon her. Then the Prince realizes what he's done! He fights Evil Dude Rotbart! He wins, killing E.D. Rotbart and freeing M.B. Swan forever! They all live happily ever after!)

Last year, while searching for appropriate teapot/flower fabric for my Mad Hatter costume, I stumbled across the book fabric shown in the skirt above. That's when I realized I wanted to be a library this year... I've been planning this costume for over a year :o).
I made most of this costume myself, including the skirt, top, and hat. The "QUIET PLEASE" sign on the top is cut out of felt. I glued it on while wearing the top and looking in the mirror (bugging Kevin every three minutes to ask if any of my letters were backwards), because that was the only way to know how it would look while I was wearing it.

Same with the book spines that make up the torso. I found old, falling apart books no one wanted, removed the spines, and attached them to a bustier, with staples, thread, and fabric glue, while wearing the bustier... because the bustier was stretchy, and this was the only way to know exactly where and how things needed …

Kristin Cashore wrote the New York Times bestsellers Graceling, Fire, Bitterblue, and Jane, Unlimited. Graceling is the winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature and Fire is the winner of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. The books are world travelers, currently scheduled to be published in thirty-four languages.

***

"Then, at last, sitting on her stretcher-bed, she took from the very bottom of her pack an old peacock-blue scarf folded around a heavy, square book. She unwrapped it and opened it very carefully, as if guilty secrets might fall from between its pages like pressed flowers. This was Harry's secret. She was a writer."

-from The Tricksters, by Margaret Mahy

Writing is my secret. Every day I unwrap and open it as carefully as I can. Welcome to my blog about writing and life! Above you'll find quick links about me and my books, and below is more about me, ways to subscribe, and an archive of past posts. Click here to go home to my most recent posts.

Finally, a note: This blog is my only online presence. I am not on Facebook, Google+, or any other social media sites, and I use Twitter mainly as an amalgamation feed for my blog. Sorry, but I do not read @-replies on Twitter!